Stinky Fingers

No Soap Radio!

If this is your first foray into the wide world of bots, look at your
finger. Open your cyborg.ipt
file with your favorite text editor (BBEdit, vim, Alpha, Microsoft Word...), and look for the word
"finger."The language of Palace scripts is
called iptscrae. Rather
than throw a dictionary at you right off,
I suggest peering occasionally at the
official docs as we go along.Okay, search for "finger"
in your Cyborg.ipt file. If you find code that looks like this:

...then your finger stinks! That's a simple, plain-vanilla
Communities.com
cheap sheet metal finger. Your first task should be to change this
stuff, because having it in there makes you look like a weenie.What is this finger stuff
anyway? It's provided as a way for other users to identify you,
and for you to identify them. It's in your INCHAT handler that is, it runs when
someone else says something. In particular, when they say
"finger" or ";finger" to you, either as regular
text or a whisper. You will automatically whisper back to them
(WHOCHAT PRIVATEMSG translates into English as "Send the
preceding text as a whisper to whoever is chatting at me").You can have just about any kind of
code in your "finger" response, from simply your name and
e-address, to any kind of complicated animation you can dream up. In
terms of looking like a dork, I'd actually suggest completely
removing your finger code over leaving it with that
"<insert e-mail>" hanging there!Here's an
annotated version
of finger code made by the
BotBot (Notes following semicolons are considered comments
by iptscrae, and ignored when the script is running).

First, we change what's been said (i.e., the contents of
CHATSTR) to lower-case, so we're happy to accept
"Finger" or ";FinGER" or whatever.

Next, we promptly ";finger" the curious user right back!

We remember who is fingering us in the global variable
whoFing so if they finger us again in the near
future (maybe they, too, auto-reply to all fingers with a
finger of their own...), we won't repeat the announcement
and we won't auto-re-finger them again (to avoid the
possibility of an endless loop of finger pointing...)

Next, we start our finger reply with "@10,10 ^"
which will jam it off into the upper left corner as a box,
rather than obscure ourselves with text (Too
bad for anyone actually sitting in that corner, I know...).

We use the iptscrae USERNAME command to get the name
set in the Preferences dialog, rather than
"hard-wiring" a fixed name in the finger string. If
you decide to change your name from "Fat Albert" to
"Prince Albert," you needn't change the cyborg code
(Then again, maybe you'd rather use a fixed name (like the
the BotBot "Prefered Name," tagged as "%p"), say your
name IRL; in which case, self-tuning name code isn't needed).

Web address, e-mail address... toss in what you like. Chaos is good
for your brain. The "\x0d" parts of the string
indicate a forced carriage return in the text (\x0d is
the hex escape code for
carriage return).

We've also changed the ";" chars to "\x3b"
(hex escapes) so that the
sometimes-buggy client doesn't
misinterpet strings starting with ";" for proper comment lines.

We've replaced the "+" signs used in the Communities.com
original with "&" signs, just to make it a tiny
bit clearer that we're concatenating strings here, not adding
numbers (whose idea was it to overload "+" in this way? Using
"&" is much, much clearer).

Not much work at all, but we've already gone a long way toward making our
personal bot skills the pride of the palace by starting on the stuff
that shows.